NgModules consolidate components, directives, and pipes into
cohesive blocks of functionality, each focused on a
feature area, application business domain, workflow, or common collection of utilities.
Modules can also add services to the application.
Such services might be internally developed, like something you'd develop yourself or come from outside sources, such as the Angular router and HTTP client.
Modules can be loaded eagerly when the application starts or lazy loaded asynchronously by the router.
NgModule metadata does the following:
* Declares which components, directives, and pipes belong to the module.
* Makes some of those components, directives, and pipes public so that other module's component templates can use them.
* Imports other modules with the components, directives, and pipes that components in the current module need.
* Provides services at the other application components can use.
Every Angular app has at least one module, the root module.
You [bootstrap](guide/bootstrapping) that module to launch the application.
The root module is all you need in a simple application with a few components.
As the app grows, you refactor the root module into [feature modules](guide/feature-modules)
that represent collections of related functionality.
You then import these modules into the root module.
## The basic NgModule
The CLI generates the following basic app module when creating a new app.
At the top are the import statements. The next section is where you configure the `@NgModule` by stating what components and directives belong to it (`declarations`) as well as which other modules it uses (`imports`). This page builds on [Bootstrapping](guide/bootstrapping), which covers the structure of an NgModule in detail. If you need more information on the structure of an `@NgModule`, be sure to read [Bootstrapping](guide/bootstrapping).
